The Biggest Fintech Funding Rounds So Far This Year -- 26 Over $50 Million

Fintech, the strange but inevitable space where our financial lives converge with technology, is having a moment. In his annual letter to shareholders
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon declared, "Silicon Valley is coming." Explaining, "There are hundreds of startups with a lot of brains and money working on various alternatives to traditional banking."

Even since Dimon made that observation in early April the money has grown, with the four largest fintech deals of the year so far coming in April and May.

Last month Zenefits, a San Francisco based human resources software company, received $500 million in Series C funding from investors ranging from mutual fund bigwig Fidelity to top Valley VC Andreessen Horowitz to Academy Award winning actor Jared Leto. The deal valued the company at $5.4 billion. In April, Chinese alternative lender Lufax raised $485 million. Then in May Ant Financial Services, the financial wing of
Alibaba Group, handed over $375 million to Indian mobile payments firm One97 Communications (the second portion of a $575 million deal announced in January.) Also in May, Affirm, a merchant facing payments platform that lets business charge consumers in monthly installments, raised a $275 million Series B.

Overall, so far this year venture back fintech firms have raised more than $8 billion in funding, including $5 billion in the second quarter alone, meaning just six months into the year the sector is poised to soon overtake the $12.4 billion raised in the entirety of 2014. With about 430 deals struck in Q1 and Q2 to date, deal activity is also rising compared to an average of 150 per quarter. Average deal size? About $18.5 million.

In a recent webinar on fintech, Anand Sanwal, founder of private company data firm CB Insights which compiled this information, noted, "This is a space that in no uncertain terms is booming."

The reasons for the boom are perhaps self-evident. First, in recent years advancements in tools like API and security technology have made it possible to scale investment management, trading and money transfer at a level not seen before for minimal marginal cost per customer. Beyond that, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are betting that consumers -- be they shoppers, business owners or both -- are ready to interact with their money in new ways because they are fed up with the existing financial services experience and accustomed to doing everything else with tech. (Hello Uber, Tinder and AirBnb.)